Jigsaw
by AtheneMiranda
Summary: All that's left of those years are photographs. BB, gen, and it's about the flash game 'MGS: Piece Walker'.


_You can play Piece Walker at _wwwDOTkonami-piecewalkerDOTjp/ - _it's a great little flash game, and it'll introduce you to all the new characters who're going to be in MGS: Peace Walker. Also, the music is surprisingly good._

*

They raised the Mother Base above the sea in pieces. As the unit multiplied she expanded in four-sided iron cells set on sunken girders, square linked to square by thin bridges that hung over the sea.

Snake stood on the edge of the helipad, watching with a hand cupped over his eye as MSF worked on the old oil rig as quickly and deftly as if they were ants. They worked on winches and pulleys, levering huge squares of steel into place. They hung from the grid by ropes with welding tools strapped to their shoulders, fixing new territory to their home. There were speedboats moored to the struts below - a flotilla, if not an armada.

He took a cigar from his pocket, and cut off the end with the tip of his survival knife.

They were a good team, for all that they were foreigners to each other, strangers who barely knew each other's faces. They never let a comrade slip. They didn't share a nation or a hell of a lot else, but they were all on the same battlefield. All soldiers were. All of them, everywhere, scrapping over the same bloody territory, laying claim to it an inch at a time, in the name of war.

*

The sun was getting higher, and every degree made the base's outdoor work a little harder. Dr Emmerich had done a lot to make the interior areas liveable - cooling systems powered by black tiles that collected sunlight, a small elevator that made use of the same smooth mechanics as Huey's wheelchair. But for construction that needed light and a minimum of heat, there was always a time limit.

Snake sent the flagging work crew inside to sleep out the afternoon, and removed himself to the Mother's nerve centre; the Tactical Operations building, where spies sat by receivers listening to their comrades report in from the mainland, day and night, relaying information and orders.

The interior was tight and upward-winding - a thin tower balanced on four huge iron pillars, full of slopes and mezzanines, all of them occupied by work. There were images everywhere. Maps tacked to walls. Surveillance pictures of the mainland, and some Snake suspected were merely striking landscapes taken with only the pretence of espionage. Emblems pinned to doors as a reminder of who outranked who. Photos of friends and teammates, or of their leader - there were a lot of pictures of their leader. None of the Mother. Only fragments of it in the backdrops, sturdy rails and sea views and corrugated iron, corners and doorways that he couldn't place because they might have been from any part of the grid.

Snake lit his cigar as he walked, squeezing past the spies at their narrow desks and the impromptu labs and darkrooms. His own desk was in a distant corner, and was little more than a shelf bolted to the wall where people occasionally left him reports and messages. As a reminder of who it belonged to, the Love Box assembly team had painted it pink.

Today, there was an envelope there. Clipped to it was a note from Hawk, the leader of the surveillance team:

_Most of this reel predates the mission. Please advise as to whether or not to dispose._

Snake recognised the first few pictures; ones he'd taken himself soon after they arrived in Costa Rica. The rest... He drew deeply on his cigar. Must've been still in his camera when he came here. Old shots. Two years ago, at least. Back when he'd been on their side. Pictures of _them_.

They were sharper and brighter than the new photos. He hadn't taken them, either. He was in the first of them, standing stiff with a group of soldiers in assorted uniforms, looking sunburned. He knew those people. They were FOXHOUND as the unit had first come to America, come from the south and looking for a new cause to fight for. They'd found it. He'd lost it again. Cut it free.

The rest were mostly more candid. Himself again, grunting at the camera. Eva, down on one knee on a floor covered in motorcycle parts, pulling a face at the person holding the camera. Snake found his eyes drawn to her belly, wondering when the shot was taken, what month in what year. How long before, or how long after.

She was in the next shot too - she, Para-Medic and Sigint. All dressed up to go to the movies. The doctor was hanging to the back of the shot, half-hidden behind Sigint, his shadow crossing her smiling face.

Snake riffled down the stack. Buildings in Washington and Moscow. A group of spies he used to lead. An armoury they'd once had stashed in the closet of a city apartment, ready for those times when an urban stealth operative might urgently require a rocket launcher. More photos of his old supposed-friends - Campbell, Raikov. There was one of Major Zero sat in an armchair, and Snake paused over it, smearing an ash-stained fingermark on its corner.

He knew who'd taken these shots. Frank Jaeger. He was good at it - steady hands, and he had a certain genius with light and shadow. And among the array of friendly faces, the young man's was notably missing. Snake set them down and turned his cigar between his fingers. Hot ash dropped onto the pile, sizzling its way down the stack.

Sometimes, he still dreamed that he saw the difference between images and reality. He'd dream depths and vectors. Faces that were contoured and unique. He'd dream that he had to close one sleeping eye to use a sight or to take a photograph.

He'd wake into flat reality, blank on the right and squared at the edges, wanting to find the person on the other side of the scope - or the lens - and kill them.

*

The last of the pictures showed a man with a heel resting on one knee, caught in the act of cleaning a spur. For five seconds Snake took the image in - the lips curling as he studied his own boot in lazy fascination, the way light caught his spurs and his eyes, the vivid contrast between his pallor and the crisp boldness of his neatly creased uniform, of his pose - and then he returned it to the bottom of the stack, where it belonged.

MSF didn't need these. He turned the pile of photos over, laid them on the desk and ran his knifepoint down their backs. He cut a straight, precise line. Then another one, an inch to its left. Two more, deep enough to feel the pink wood splintering below his hand. A minute later, discontented with the neat strips, he turned his knife and ran it perpendicular to how he'd began.

He stared at the grid of paper squares, strangely satisfied, and brushed them into one hand.

Snake stepped out into the heat and stared at the flat horizon. He dropped his handful of scraps into the sea. He watched water soak through the backing paper, making it half-translucent, washed-out, substanceless.

*

He'd never had a photograph of her anyway.


End file.
